Chris Rock’s Rob Petrie

Ali LeRoi is a strapping man with long dreadlocks that go down his back and a contagious laugh that makes his eyes disappear. So why does the co-creator of “Everybody Hates Chris” and Chris Rock’s longtime writing and producing partner insist that he is Dick Van Dyke?

LeRoi grew up in Chicago in the 1960s, the kind of kid who liked to lie at the foot of his mother’s bed on Saturday nights to catch “The Carol Burnett Show.” He always loved comedy, and another favorite was “The Dick Van Dyke Show” -- the classic sitcom about the head writer of a TV series, his family and his crew -- which LeRoi watched in afternoon reruns. If there was such a thing as a typical black kid in his neighborhood, LeRoi wasn’t it.

“I started watching comedy eons ago, and it was all about Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner,” said LeRoi, referring to two of Burnett’s regulars during a recent lunch break in his Paramount lot office. “When everybody was into Richard Pryor, I was into George Carlin.”

In 1997 Rock hired LeRoi and his then writing partner, Lance Crouther, to write for “The Chris Rock Show” on HBO. A husband and father of two, LeRoi found himself living out his own version of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” with Rock as Alan Brady, and co-writers Wanda Sykes as Buddy Sorell and Crouther as Sally Rogers.

“And I was Dick Van Dyke,” he said. “I had a wife and a couple of kids and we lived in New Jersey at the time and it was a weird thing that happened. I’m actually that guy.”

And he still is, in a way. The man who founded the eccentric and successful Mary Wong sketch group when he was in high school and later toured with Bernie Mac as a stand-up is in charge of one of the fall season’s few breakout hits. “Everybody Hates Chris” is loosely autobiographical, but it’s not just Rock’s story of growing up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn that the show portrays. There’s a lot from LeRoi’s life too, from Rochelle, the mother with a special brand of tough love, to young Chris’ friendship with a white boy.

LeRoi, 43, has made a life out of telling jokes. One of the most influential African American comedic voices in the country, he has written material for Rock, Mac and Orlando Jones among others, but enjoys staying behind the scenes; his lines are better known than his name.

“The weird thing about being a comedian and having a comedian’s mind is that you don’t know why you see the world differently,” LeRoi said. “A few of us are fortunate enough to understand that there’s actually a way you can go make money and continue to be that person. Other people just have to shut up and behave themselves.”

On “Everybody Hates Chris,” LeRoi is happiest calling the shots on the set and managing the writers and crew.

“There are people who want to be in front of the audience, you can’t stop them from being in front of a crowd,” LeRoi said. “And I enjoy it but I didn’t need it. Some people need that sort of attention. Martin [Lawrence] needs it. Bernie Mac needs it. Chris Rock needs it.... I actually preferred and needed to be in control or have control over the product.... I’d rather be the David Kelley of comedy than Eddie Murphy. I’m more suited to it.”

Complementary talents

LeRoi’s knack for unconventional comedy led him in the early ‘90s to Rock, a young stand-up comic who was also working the New York club scene.

“Mary Wong was the black equivalent of Monty Python,” said Reggie Hudlin, president of BET and director of the “Everybody Hates Chris” pilot. “They were just brilliant conceptual geniuses. And Chris was becoming a brilliant public enemy of stand-up comics. So you had a group of guys from Chicago and another guy from Brooklyn, working different comedy, but both being very innovative and very cutting edge.”

After Rock became famous for his stint on “Saturday Night Live” and his HBO special, “Bring the Pain,” he got a deal for his own HBO show, and he called LeRoi and Crouther to join the writing team, which also included Sykes.

“It just seemed like a really great match to me because they complemented each other in that they could convey the travails of being an intelligent black person with an eclectic sensibility,” Hudlin said. “To love U2 and Ludacris equally, that’s not everybody. But Chris and Ali were both that kind of person. They both understood what the working class was and at the same time had a refined sensibility.”

LeRoi, who was writing for Mac and opening for him, attempted to do both jobs at the same time, but eventually left the road to focus on writing. In four seasons, “The Chris Rock Show” garnered five Emmy nominations and one win. “Out of all the writers, Ali and Chris tended to gravitate toward each other more because I think Ali is really great at executing other people’s ideas, and he has great ideas of his own,” Crouther said. “Ali is really a facilitator. He makes stuff happen....And Chris is very opinionated and Ali is good at being able to counter some of Chris’ opinions and offer different opinions.”

Rock puts it a different way: “Ali has a way of understanding my gibberish and putting it on a piece of paper where other people would just think I’m slightly retarded. He knows how to find the gold in the dirt.”

Those skills later carried the men through three movies, “Down to Earth,” “Pootie Tang,” and “Head of State,” which they co-wrote, and led to “Everybody Hates Chris.” Conversations about the TV show began four years ago with Fox executives, who were interested in working with Rock. But it wasn’t until LeRoi and Rock finished “Head of State” that the concept for a family-based comedy, with Rock, as an off-camera narrator, began to take shape. The show begins in 1982, when the fictional Chris (Tyler James Williams) turns 13.

“It was just a nice line of demarcation culturally,” LeRoi said. “Hip-hop was just beginning and besides that, Sinbad owned the ‘70s, and we really didn’t want to trudge into the Sinbad territory. So we decided to go toward the ‘80s, but we didn’t want to do a whole lark on the culture of the ‘80s. We’re probably closer to ‘Good Times’ than anything else but with a more contemporary execution of the show. So if you blend ‘Bernie Mac’ and ‘The Wonder Years’ with the heart of ‘Good Times’ and shoot it like ‘Scrubs,’ that’s where this show is.”

Ratings booster

Fox eventually passed on the show, so UPN president Dawn Ostroff started working the phones, trying to get Rock’s attention. CBS’ sister network had come up in the world in recent years with its “America’s Next Top Model” reality show franchise and its high-quality cult drama “Veronica Mars,” but Ostroff knew a comedy with Rock’s name on it could elevate the network’s brand to new heights. The deal closed in mid-February, three months before the networks present their new schedules to advertisers in New York.

“We were under the gun so it was all about quickly rolling up your sleeves and jumping in,” Ostroff said. “Chris has the actual experience and the ability to know when something is funny and when to make something big out of something small. Ali has the ability to take a lot of that and frame it into a script.”

“Everybody Hates Chris” premiered on Sept. 22 with 7.8 million viewers, handing UPN it’s highest comedy rating ever, and has sustained an average of 6.3 million viewers.

Rock says he leaves the running of the show to LeRoi because he is better with details, and Rock is just too restless.

“This show is kind of fun, but I’m the kind of guy that when I do one stand-up show, I almost want to pass the tape out to the rest of the country,” Rock said one recent afternoon, after stepping into LeRoi’s office to tinker with the script for the Halloween episode.

“A TV show in a lot of ways, you’re doing the same idea over and over again in a different way. I bore real easy. I have to fight that doing this show.”

And, yes, LeRoi and Rock sometimes fight each other.

“It’s always about trying to make something better,” LeRoi said. “He’ll call me on my crap and the respect of it is that I get to call him on his. He’ll go, ‘You can tell me I’m wrong, but you better be right’ and what’s happened in the past is that I’ve been right. You got to be willing to stand up to the funniest guy in America and go, hey, man, that’s not such a good idea. A lot of guys have yes-men. Somebody needs a no-man.”

At this stage of the Rock-LeRoi partnership, it’s impossible for their friends to detect who came up with what lines in the show and whose perspective is in a particular scene, Crouther and Sykes said. But what Crouther envies about his friends is the way they’ve been able to blend three forms of comedy seamlessly.

“You have this really realistic family show based on a lot of truths that doesn’t feel like a ‘sitcom,’ ” he said. “Then you have the Chris Rock voice-over going across, which is exactly Chris: sharp, incisive and cutting edge. And then you get these pop-outs where you can jump into his fantasies and go very broad comically. When you get those three forms -- the comedy of the real, the comedy of the witty and insightful and the comedy of the absurd -- and make it all work in one piece, you’ve got something special.”

For LeRoi, the highest compliment would be to know that the show’s audience realizes that he and Rock truly understand the world they are depicting every week.

“When we’re talking about pregnancy, economics, the crime rate, food stamps, fighting and cursing, we’re talking about it firsthand,” LeRoi said. “We’re not talking about it like it’s this crazy, shiny substance that we should be in awe of. We’re not the thing inside the case in ‘Pulp Fiction.’ Ooooh, what is it? It’s amazing! It’s black people!”

“We’re just going, hey, black people are just regular,” he added.

“These people sit down to dinner every day and Mom cooks and they talk about what happened during the day. That’s the extraordinary thing we’re showing: people acting regular. Some people work. Some people don’t work. Some people are educated. Some people are less educated. “We’re just making these people part of the fabric of this landscape, part of the fabric of this community. It’s just all there. And that’s what I think makes the viewer look at it and understand these people know this place.”